Comprehensive School Safety in Atlanta Public Schools, Georgia, 2015-2021 (ICPSR 38459)
The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) is a research-focused initiative that was launched by the National Institute of Justice in response to high-profile incidents of school violence. The CSSI grant program aimed to identify and understand the root causes of school violence and identify effective strategies for responding to and resolving safety and security issues. The Atlanta Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (Atlanta CSSI) project, funded in 2016 under the National Institute of Justice's CSSI grant program, and as a partnership between researchers and practitioners, centered around the fundamental question of how to design and implement safe and supportive learning environments for students in Atlanta Public Schools (APS).
Since 2014, district leadership from APS and researchers from WestEd and Georgia State University (GSU) developed a blended research and technical assistance approach to make progress towards improving school safety. The findings are based on data gathered through:
- focus groups with school-and district-based staff;
- observational protocols and meeting notes; and
- school-level student climate and discipline data gathered by the state.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools Campus Shield Evaluation, Miami, Florida, United States, 2014-2019 (ICPSR 37332)
In 2015, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) received a three-year Comprehensive School Safety Initiative grant from the National Institute of Justice to implement, pilot test, and experimentally evaluate the effects of an innovative fusion center, Campus Shield, for proactively identifying and addressing school safety threats and issues. Three additional resources were also proposed to supplement and enhance the Campus Shield fusion center: visitor management systems (information on entries and exits from the school building to be recorded and fed into Campus Shield), surveillance cameras (which would also feed into Campus Shield), and the linkage of Campus Shield to "Mental Health Specialists" to provide direct services and act as a liaison between school-based student services professionals and community-based providers.